Dear reader,

As I’ve mentioned before, one major reason why I started this blog was to help improve my writing habit and return to a hobby I’ve loved for most of my life. The real question was, and honestly still is, what do I write about for an endless number of posts? I cycled through the many hobbies I’ve dabbled in like beekeeping, photography, reading, watching old films, guitar, plants, etc, but I don’t know enough in any one hobby to sustain a successful blog focusing on a niche interest.

In my last blog post, I had mentioned the creative writing class I had taken the second semester of my senior year of high school within a small group of three other classmates. I had a cute notebook, the cover a picture of two feminine maxi dresses hanging on a clothesline next to a lace tablecloth, that I used for this class and still have in my possession. In this notebook, I wrote one- or two-line observations from any given day. Here are some of my favorites:

1/7/15: brownie cookies are the best cookies

1/8/15: it’s never a good idea to watch a Zac Efron movie right before bed

1/9/15: Leonardo DiCaprio aged really well

2/10/15: if you turn the music up loud enough in the car, the sound encloses your body

These observations make me smile because even though I have no context for why I wrote what I did, it still evokes some thought and consideration like, are brownie cookies still the best cookies? I would say it depends on the brand but even then, maybe now I say M&M cookies are the best cookies. Do I still agree it’s never a good idea to watch a Zac Efron movie right before bed? Maybe, but as a teenager who didn’t date in high school, it was very easy to pine after an attractive man with some sort of romantic arc and wish I was the girl Zac Efron was into. And as far as I’m concerned, Leo is still aging well though his dating habits certainly knock him down into a bit of a creepy territory.

But that last observation about turning the music up in the car transports me back to those later teenage years, full of feeling endless possibilities and invincibility and youthfulness. I had recently turned 18 when I wrote down this observation and I remember at that time being in a persistent state of existentialism. I was both rooted in the present moment and aloft in the unknowing of the shape my life would take on. I chose to immortalize this time of my life through a collection of old iPhone photos of the sky on random days, often taken through my windshield while stopped at traffic signs and lights. I was awestruck that you never see the same sky twice and studying the sky served as a tangible visual of the passage of time; this made me feel really small, but in the good way that helped put the size and weight of my problems into perspective.

Back to the observation: letting the sound of the radio enclose my body was like feeling cocooned in something raw and passionate, the product of someone else’s story and dreams. I know that sounds cheesy, but in this false wisdom that only youth can provide, I felt inflated thinking about how art is universal and the type of connection I wanted to provide the world through my writing. I wanted to be a story-teller but didn’t feel like I had many stories to tell in my young life. I embraced this as a challenge to experience adventures and be open to any possibility and was anxious with the waiting for them to present themselves. After all, so many people before me worked hard to achieve their grandest dreams, so why couldn’t I?

All this to say, for the time being, this blog will be about observations and my reflections that come along with them. That’s what our favorite stories really are anyways: a series of observations and the reactions and emotions associated with them. Just like my old photos of the sky, they appear grainy and mundane on the surface but sinking deeper into the why opens up an entirely different view. If we can’t discuss the simple things of our daily existence, how can we explore the profound?

🙂