Everything is Bigger in Texas...

Or so I have heard. Today, about two minutes after I had woken up, I got a call from none other than mL. I have been trying to get her to call me for some time now and I was really glad to finally hear from her. She left Utah for the last time as a resident about two months ago and, while we have been emailing each other, I have not actually talked to her since the day before she left. That day was really weird to me. How do you say goodbye to someone who has been one of the best friends you have ever had? How do you let go of that? You do not, really. We said goodbye that day as we had many times. There was no crying... Though I was in tears the second I got into my sister's car. We hugged and I left... It lacked finality. Maybe that is a good thing, because, while that may have been the last time I would see her for a while, I will see her again. I am sure of it. Anyway, I talked to mL for about 2 hours today. It was really good to hear what she has been up to in Texas and I am glad that she is making friends.

In other news (ha ha), the first week of school went pretty well, if not insanely crazy. It was busy and it felt weird but it made me happy to have something to do everyday and it was great to hang out with my friends everyday. I like all but one of my classes and I think that this year is going to be a really good one.

I do not really have a whole lot to say today... I just felt like I should write something. Today has been a fairly slow day for me... I have not really done anything. Now my family is at the store and I am blasting a playlist of my favorite female singers and singing along really badly. I should be starting my reading for AP Psychology, but you know me. I will get to it later tonight, I think.

Other than that... Not much going on. I picked up my van from my grandparents house on Friday and now it is sitting in front of my house. I do not see it going anywhere for a while. That is perfectly fine with me, though. I have an issue with driving. Not that I can not drive. I am afraid of it until I am actually behind the wheel and going.

Oh! I need to get one of those things that connects to your iPod and can go into a tape player. Once I can drive my van, it would be really cool to be able to listen to my music while I am driving.

Anyway... This blog is pretty much random and very pointless. Whatever. Sometime soon I will update on the craziness that is my life. There is a lot to be told.

Anyone Know Where I Can Get an Off Switch for My Brain?

I have been thinking a lot lately. It is a result of summer coming to a close and school starting in a couple of days and me still trying to find ways to procrastinate on all of the work I have to get done before Monday. Thinking is hardly ever a completely good thing for me. Sometimes when I think I come up with interesting or fun things. However, lately my mind is stuck on a couple of topics that put me in a bad mood. It is a problem, and I know this, but I can not help it.

It is no surprise that this summer did not go the way I planned. What in life ever does? Maybe I should stop having expectations about how things are going to be so that I am no longer disappointed. Then again, if I stopped having expectations then the really good things would not seem really good because I did not expect anything of it anyway. . . Does that make sense? I do not know if it does.

Anyway, whenever anything related to my failed summer (which has not been absolutely horrible, I have done some fun things) is brought up I kind of shrink back from conversation. My mom has started noticing this, I guess, and has started asking me what is wrong. Talking about it does not make it better. At least, not anymore. Two months after my accident, I just want things to be good. I want the reminder of it to go away. I want people to trust my driving. I want to stop being afraid every single time I get into a car. It was not that bad. No one was hurt. However, one thing about me is that when something bad happens (crashing a car, a 4-wheeler, or anything like that) and I do not get right back out there and keep going I become afraid.

This has happened to me twice before with 4-wheelers. A couple years ago (2? I do not remember.) I was going up a hill on a 4-wheeler at Bear Lake with my cousin, Hailee. I must not have been going fast enough, or something. I think I tried to change gears while we were going up and all of the sudden we were falling back. My cousin and I went into instinct mode and we moved together to get the 4-wheeler back on all fours. However, after we got back to camp I did not go back on the 4-wheelers for the rest of the trip. I think that was the last trip we went on that year. I do not really remember what the next chance I got to ride a 4-wheeler was, but I remember I was scared.

My last accident on a 4-wheeler pretty much ruined it for me. Emily and I were going up a dune and she braked before we got to the top. She used the back brakes and so the bike flipped. Emily got out of the way, but the bike landed on me. I was perfectly fine, but I no longer have the courage to ride 4-wheelers. If I was given a chance to go out without anyone else on it and mess around for a while I could probably be fine again, but It has been a long time since then and I have not really gotten that chance.

I think the same thing has happened with the car accident. I have driven a car a total of two times in the last two months, both within the first couple weeks after the accident. Since then I have grown increasingly aware of every single thing that could go wrong while in a car, and within the last few weeks I have found myself actually physically cringing every single time I see anything that could go wrong. It does not matter who is driving. I know I am one hundred percent safe when I am in a car my mom or step dad are driving but now I find myself freaked out. I have found that the best way to avoid this is to just close my eyes and ignore everything around me. However, when Carley is driving me somewhere she often needs me to tell her directions. So I have to pay attention to where we are.

I am hoping that when I eventually have another car and can start driving again I will not be afraid. I know for the first little while it will not be fun at all, but, hopefully, I will only be driving to and from school for a little while. I do not really know. It is thoughts about this and about how much I need a job along with other things like how much I miss my dad and my sister that have got me in a bad mood lately. I am trying to get past it all, but it is hard when I do not really have a lot going on during the day. This is why I absolutely can not wait for school to start. This year is going to be so busy for me, that hopefully it will be a distraction from all of this other stuff. I have found that hanging out with friends also distracts me a lot.

In 7th and 8th grades my best friends were Manda and Darcie (and Morgan but I am not talking about her right now.) Lately, I have started talking to them and hanging out with them more (along with Ian.) It is awesome that I have more people to hang out with than my typical group of friends. I absolutely love my other friends, but a little bit of change is good sometimes.

Anyway, this blog was going to be about my sister, Wendy. I guess I got a little caught up in talking about other things. Whoops. Sorry, Wendy. I will write about you another time.

Best Friends

Tonight I thought I would write a little bit about my best friends. I just read one of their blogs and I haven't really written anything of real substance lately. So I figured he was a good topic that I could write a little bit of meaningful words about... Hopefully.

On television it seems to me that a lot of the time (at least on shows aimed at teens/preteens) the main character always has two best friends. One guy and one girl to be specific. I'm a lot like that. My two best friends, Ian and Kara, are the people in my life who probably know the most about me, other than my mom. I've known them both for around four years. However, neither of them were my best friends until long after I met them.

Kara and I met through a mutual friend of ours in the beginning of 7th grade. Hillary introduced us at a Science Olympiad meeting, and, at the time, both of us were shy and did not really talk to each other much. This continued on through all of 7th grade and well into 8th. In fact, I think I can attribute our friendship to my mom's silliness when we were at the national Science Olympiad competition. We had developed a little bit of a friendship at team meetings over the past two years, but it was not until my mom gave us an inside joke (chicken) that we really became friends.

After we got back from Kansas, Kara and I started talking more, specifically in our U.S. History class with Mr. Carter (it is ironic that it was also in this class that I started to become friends with Ian (more on him later).) At first we mostly talked about silly things. Though I can't remember exactly the topics, many inside jokes came from these conversations. Over the past two years Kara and I have become more than the casual acquaintances we were when Hillary first introduced us.

Our conversations now consist of long pauses where neither of us know quite what to say. However, Kara is a great listener. Throughout the passed two years she has helped me get through so much. Earlier this year I might have said that she probably does not know how much, but I think she does now.

I could talk about what a great friend Kara is to me for hours. There are things she does that I can not stand sometimes and in my opinion that just makes our friendship better. No person is perfect, no one is without their flaws. When friends are able to see that their friends have problems and maybe even be annoyed by those problems it shows that they have a good friendship. Obviously, it takes more than that but that is one thing that is important to me. I think I will have to ask Kara if she thinks any of the things I do are obnoxious... Ha ha.

I think I will move on to Ian, now, because he is who is on my mind tonight. Ian and I also met through mutual friends. Though I do not think we were ever really introduced. It was more like 'oh, I know who you are, you hang out with so-and-so' than anything else.

As I mentioned earlier, Ian and I first started talking to each other in our 8th grade U.S. History class. There was a group of us who sat in a corner and would talk all the way through class (Kara was never part of this group... that I remember). In October of 9th grade Ian called me one night and asked if I would like to go to the haunted house with him and some other friends. (On a quick side note, it just struck me how long ago this feels and how not long ago it really was... Almost two years, but not quite. And yet it seems like four.) I agreed to meet him at the elementary school by my house and then we would see who else was able to come.

To our luck it turned up that no one could come with us. We still had a great time, though. I remember one part of the haunted house that is hilarious looking back on it. We got to this bedroom and noticed that we had to go through a closet full of coats and clothes. We were both so sure that there was going to be something in the closet and neither of us wanted to go first. We were squealing and shoving each other and basically just not moving forward. Eventually a creepy guy from the last room came in and scared us to go through what was just a closet full of clothing.

After we were done at the haunted house that night we went to Burger Stop and I refused his offer to get me something. Then he walked me back to the elementary school we met at. It was dark, it was late, and I knew I was in trouble. However, I still think that that night was awesome. I had so much fun and Ian and I were starting to become good friends.

However, that night he told me that he was done going to Fairfield. He was going to be home schooled from now on. I am not the kind of person who typically hangs out with friends outside of school (more so then) and so I knew I would not be seeing Ian very much anymore.

In fact, over the next year I saw him once, for his birthday, and only had a few very short 'hi, how are you' conversations. Then in March Ian got a Facebook. I am looking at his page right now and it is funny to see all of the messages he got from people who had not heard from him in ages. After that we started talking again and hung out a couple times.

Now we basically talk to each other everyday. Yesterday, he came over to my house and we did basically nothing for hours one end. We have spent days at Lagoon, bowling, walking all over Layton. Give us some free time and we will find something to do or talk about. He has helped me through more than one hard moment in the past few months, though I am not sure he knows it.

Anyway, it is late and this blog has taken me a long time to write... I do not even know if there is anything worth reading here... Oh well. I guess I will find my inspiration again eventually.

...

My mind is such a mess lately. That is my excuse for not writing anything in two weeks. Another excuse could be that I have been busy... At least for one week. The last week has been a blur of procrastination for the most part. It's summer, I shouldn't have anything to procrastinate, right? Wrong. Summer reading, along with my duties as editor in chief for the school paper and reporter for FBLA are all things that I just can't get myself to actually work on. I need to, though.

The week before, however, was quite busy. Sunday the 19th found me at my grandparents house for a barbecue in celebration of my grandpa's birthday on the 20th. The next morning I was up early and packing for an overnight FBLA officer retreat. I had been really nervous about this since I heard about it, because I didn't really know any of the other officers and they all knew each other. I was still nervous about it for the first few hours that I was there.

What the retreat was really, was a way for us to get started on planning the year as well as getting to know each other. The work part of it was really successful, in my opinion. However, the fun part didn't come until after all of that. When we got done working we went back to our condo to have dinner and basically hang out for the rest of the night. It was really fun.

I was beat at air hockey and Foosball by people who were more experienced at those games. The losing didn't matter though, because I was finding that I was easily becoming friends with these people. I played pool with three other girls and we had a lot of fun (none of us were that good at it). After a while everyone got together to play catchphrase. That was interesting, for sure. We did a lot of other things too, but the best part of it to me was just talking. Of course, the two guys who were there didn't really take part in that, but it was great getting to know the girls.

We talked a ton that day, about everything: Harry Potter, our families, embarrassing things that happened to us, etc. The funnest part of it was after curfew, though. At midnight the boys had to go upstairs and the girls had to stay in the basement to "sleep". What actually ended up happening was most of us gathering in the one small bedroom and talking about boys. It was great. I know that may seem weird, because I don't talk about guys with my sisters and not with any of my friends other than Kara, but I honestly enjoyed it.

Anyway, I was back home at around 12 the next day. I had to get straight to work on getting ready for our 5 day camping trip to Flaming Gorge. Which was crazy and deserves a blog to itself, complete with pictures, to come at a later date.

So, that's why I haven't written in the past two weeks... And now I don't know what to write about...

I've been thinking about this blog for the last hour. So many topics have ran through my mind that it is ridiculous. I thought about writing about my best friend. I thought about writing about my family. I even was thinking about writing about how much things have changed lately. The conversations I've been having that all seem to feature the fact that it has been four years since I met whoever I was talking to (because the fact is, I met everyone who really matters (outside of my family) four years ago or less). Then there's the things that I could write about that wouldn't matter or that would be weird for certain people to read...

Anyway, something just happened... I might write on it later, but for now, I'm out.