Let me pour kool-aid on ya real slow!

Heh. I just wanted to name one of these blogs something dirty. Especially something as dumb as that. Kool-aid? Really? Anyway. I'm supposed to be writing an essay on testimonies from the female coal miners in the 19th century.
3 couples broke up this weekend. Pah. Dating is overrated. I decided to stop dating a few months ago. Well. Stop till college. I'm really glad I've decided that too. It's breakup season.
I made Alfredo sauce from scratch today. My mom usually cooks, but she hurt her back, so I went grocery shopping and cooked the most ballin' dinner in the world. It had broccoli and cauliflower in it. "She looks like one of those rap artist's girlfriends."
I would discuss something meaningful, but my brain feels pretty damn weak right now and I'd hate to ruin a perfectly good topic with a crappy state of mind.
So I was just on facebook, and this girl put "Chris" as her "religious views". Wow. And her interests section was like "soccer, softball, guys, softball, guys, soccer..." Oooh, and her political views were "uh... idk"
Hey the picture worked. I'm gonna add pictures to all my blogs now!

Sorry blogger.

I'm actually starting to feel like a creep, writing my life story on a blog. And I'm a little mad at myself for staying up so late last night writing. I really don't have the ability to lose that much sleep over this kind of thing right now. If I get sick, I won't be able to properly recover. I can't risk missing more soccer, and missing school is too much work. Plus I'll probably have to stay up late tonight to work on an essay and a take-home test. I told one of my friends about being mad at myself for that and he told me to get a life. If I didn't have a life, I couldn't write about it. I guess this blog is a bit of an interruption in my life story, but digging into all those memories is a little tiring. Drunk boy's phone died, so I have to wait for him to get home and plug it in to talk to him about this. I really feel a draw to finish this blogging thing, but I don't know how much time I have. And I don't want to spend every minute of my free time typing on a blog site.
I miss my English class. There's an amazing ex-marine teacher at my school who teaches English, and I had his class for the first time last semester. Not only was it a great class, but it really forced me to think about a lot of things going on in my life. He would assign us journals that were a little personal sometimes, but we all trusted him and just wrote our pure, unedited thoughts. That's kind of why I'm doing a blog. I figured out that writing down my thoughts can be a cathartic experience. Once I get them all out there, they don't have to be in my head anymore. This blog is really more for my own benefit than for anyone else who may make a sideways glance at my page. Sure, drunk boy is reading them, but so far, I haven't really typed anything on here that is any more personal than the things I've already told him. It's a lot more difficult to just let go of my pride and write EVERYTHING than I thought. I keep finding myself thinking, "nah he'll think I'm a creep" or, "better not write that, it might hurt someone's feelings." And with a lot of things, that automatic doubting is good. I was a little pissed at get-a-life boy's insult this morning and I almost bitched about him on here. Though it might have helped, none of it would be genuine. I want to be able to write any and all of my thoughts on here, but only if they're honestly what I believe.

Apology accepted.

Whew. Actually. It's 1:49 a.m. and I'm not tired at all. This blogging thing feels amazing. I love being able to write down all of my thoughts. Reading through them later always seems to provide me with a new discovery about myself. Especially when I'm in a bind and need to just bitch and whine for a while. Afterward, I can read my complaints, discard the ones that aren't useful, and actually solve the problem.
Back to this mini-autobiography and psychoanalysis of the one and only, Romanov. By the way, my real name is not Romanov. The Romanov family is Catherine the Great's family. And I'm far from a history buff. It's my trail name on the Appalachian Trail, so it seemed like a good one to use for a blog alias.
Soccer was going pretty well. JV was a lot of fun. And the coach is the coolest small bald man I've ever met. At that point in time, the actual game of soccer was not something I valued the team for at all. I mean it was fun to play, yeah, but it didn't really mean anything to me at the time. The real value of that team was the friends I made.
I'm starting to wonder if I'm saying wayyy to many things that sound like average inspired person things to say. I'm also wondering if that made any sense...
Drunk boy is apparently not actually drunk. I'm not sure if I believe him, but he just told me that he is actually just "patiently waiting for the next update". It sent a wave of warm-and-fuzzy through my tummy. :) I honestly didn't expect him to be so interested in my life story.
Come spring break of my sophomore year, I hiked a section of the Appalachian Trail for that week. I was dating a kid who is half Cuban. And I'm not talking about the small brown men with funny looking mustaches. This guy is attractive. Anyway, the trip was my first long trip (longer than a weekend). This trip was also one of the most enlightening experiences I've ever had. It was the beginning of my relationship with the only lover I have ever been able to keep for over 2 months. And we're still going strong! :]
Being away from public society for a week was amazing. I-... am having a really hard time figuring out how to describe the feelings I'm thinking of. At one point in one of the days, I drifted to about halfway between the faster half of the group and the slower half. Neither of the groups were visible or audible. Complete silence except for the sounds of the mountains surrounding me. It was beautiful. I actually think I may have cried a little. Those moments were just one of the many enlightening parts of the trip. The first 3 days of the trip were ridiculously misty and rainy. One of us got sick and another was having problems with her injured knee. We took a rest day on top of a misty ridge. There were wild ponies. We were able to approach them. They were very calm around humans, which worries me a little, but I don't think AT hikers would feed horses any of their precious food, so I don't think that's why they were so calm when we touched them and reveled in the awesomeness. The rest day was day 2. After hiking through the mist and rain all day, we camped in a field on a small slope about 50 feet from the trail. We went to refill water that night. It was so cool. On our way back, we stopped on the slope for a minute and looked around. We could only see the ground beneath us in a circle with a radius of about 10 feet. The morning of the 4th day, we wake up to sun, get out of the tent, and find ourselves staring at an absolutely gorgeous view of a valley and glorious mountains surrounding us. It's impossible for anyone but those who were on the trip with me to understand the feeling I had as soon as I scrambled out of the half dome tent. Words cannot express it. There was no more rain.
When I came back home, my half brown boy came over so I could tell him all about it. I didn't even bother taking a shower. I made an attempt at telling him the general story and I tried, I really did, explaining my discoveries about life and beauty. I became a much more happy and optimistic person. We broke up a few weeks later. I was mopey for about 4 days when we were fighting and discovering that it was ending, but the day we broke up, I was the one to make the decision to end it. I realized that he had been causing too much pain and stress, and that I really didn't need him to be happy. Needless to say, my two girlfriends who came over that evening with ice cream and sappy movies were a little disappointed when I was actually a little jubilant. I think the reason we started having problems was because I had changed so much over that one week. I had gained a sort of inner happiness that I don't think he had achieved, even with one more year of life than me. He wasn't really a sad person, I was just never able to communicate my experiences to him in a way that would inspire him to find his own deep happiness. Once I realized that, I had even one more thing to be proud of. My satisfaction with how I was beginning to live my life.
Drunk boy: better hurry. or else...
Me: or else what?
Drunk boy: it's on.
Don't get your panties in a twist.

Turns out: he's drunk.

Oops. He says he's not that bad when he's drunk. So hopefully he won't drunkenly spew personal parts of my blog to his guy friends...
As I was saying, about halfway through my sophomore year, I started the outdoors group again. Having not been remotely athletic since like 5th grade, I didn't exactly fit in so well with the handful of teens my age.
Oh stop complaining about this not being deep and personal enough, drunk boy! It's a work in progress.
My first trip since returning to the program was a one night car camping sort of thing. We were doing a practice run of the rappel-a-thon fundraiser we do every year to raise money to help pay for our summer trips. It was fun, sure, but like any other new experience, a little awkward and embarrassing. I uh, may have expressed my hopes of getting hypothermia so a certain cute (younger) boy would have to get naked in a sleeping bag with me... Maybe...
Just to make things awkward in both age groups, I made a small awkward error during one of the next trips. I decided to hang out with the older members instead. For some reason I'm straddling the imaginary age boundary. There are about 4 16 year old members. 2 of them are in the older, more experienced group, and the other 2 (one of them being me) are in the younger, less experienced group. Back to the 2nd awkward experience. So a small group of friends from the older group invited me into one of the tents for "story time". "Story time" is basically exactly what it sounds like. A time to tell stories about ourselves. I was still at that stage where I was striving to find a tight little group to fit into and become close to. So naturally, I tried wayyy too hard to impress them. But one of the guys was especially attractive. Like, at the man-god level. He also happened to be one of those people who are just naturally nice, so even if I seemed like the creepiest, most annoying girl on the face of the planet, he would lead me to believe he only had good feelings toward me. So we decided to have a spoon-fest. Just to have a spoon-fest I guess. Then people got sleepy. One of the guys left. A guy and a girl left to take a walk (they were close friends and actually dated for a time). And it ended up being me, attempting to snuggle up with the man-god. I cuddled up to his side, sucking in as much of his wonderful scent as I could. I was determined to fall asleep. He was already asleep. The two who went on a walk came back and found him asleep and me fake asleep. They woke him up. And he basically told me to go away. The girl who had gone on the walk was apparently interested in the man-god at the time, and the guy who went on the walk was a little interested in me. I think. So they both ignored me and made me feel like shit the next day. The man-god continued to be nice to me. I found out that humans can't just bury their heads in the sand.
About a month later, I joined soccer. I'm pretty sure it was the real beginning of my life. Birth is just a minor step towards the beginning. But I'm not saying soccer is my sole true love. By all means. I love it. But a lot of the things I love about being on the soccer team have nothing to do with the game.
Oooh! At some point I think I'll go back to my blogs and put pictures in them to go along with the stories. :D
Soccer made me attractive. I was kinda cute before then, but man. I gained so much confidence when those leg muscles started becoming defined and sexy. And I finally gained a little bit of a butt. Flat butts are always an appeal-killer.
With a knowledge of my own attractiveness came truckloads of confidence. The only real way to appreciate self-confidence is starting out without it and having to work for it. I busted my ass for it and built up an ass at the same time!
I started to fit in better with my outdoors group. I temporarily gave up on the older group. The younger group accepted me in like a small lost puppy. I grew attached to them and realized that I didn't have to with the cooler older group. The younger group turned out to be the kind of cool that mattered. The kind of cool that isn't as judgmental, stressful, and as difficult to achieve as the olders seemed to possess. The youngers managed to perfect the kind of cool that drew me to them, then ended up maturing me. They are some of my most trustworthy and reliable friends now. I've spent so much time with them that they're basically my family. Actually, I take that back. I hate using family as a compliment. I love my family, but that's not what they resemble. Most family members don't really understand the rest of their families. They're always there for you if you need them, sure, but they don't go to each other to talk about deeply personal stuff. I mean I guess some do, but I don't. I've never felt totally comfortable talking to any of my family members about my personal thoughts. So i guess I should rephrase that comparison. The youngers and the trips we went on became my second life. A world I could go to that was completely detached from my high school world. A world of simplicity and beauty.
Time to publish again so drunk boy will stop bitching at me.

Gee thanks, coffee.

Most people are inspired to begin a sculpture or start a new life. And this usually happens through the media, a model celebrity, or a traumatic experience. Say hello to the 16 year old girl who was just inspired to... blog. In this case, through a movie. "Julie and Julia". I figured, "hey, that girl became a writer when she started blogging about her passion, maybe I'll give it a shot!" Who knows how this will turn out... Anyone?
Being a teenager and finding something independent of other humans that can consistently (I just found out how to properly spell "consistently") make me feel warm and fuzzy inside is... well... it seems pretty obvious, right? Next to impossible. What do I know? After only 16 years of existence, how could I have possibly explored my options and reasoned out the best one? Beats me. Maybe I could have devoted every second of my life since I hit high school (and developed a real brain, not those fake ones you get when you're born) to searching for a passion. But that's ridiculous. I probably wouldn't know what radians are if I did that, and heaven forbid I don't know what radians are. In all seriousness though, that doesn't seem like a very good idea.
Oh no. I just pulled up my playlist.com account and started listening to "No Rain" by Blind Melon. It completely severed my line of thinking.
Ok. Focus Romanov. Focus.
So. Searching for a passion. Right. My first mature emotional expression through something non-human was music. I fell in love with playing the flute. When I felt like a pile of crap thrown into some mediocre fashion items and mailed in a small box to a high school with a handful of beautiful, artistic people, I came home and floated through the mysterious notes of a Scottish air on my flute. I made 1st chair in the high school's wind ensemble my freshman year. I figured I was probably the shit in the category of flute skills. And that's all that mattered at the time. That's all that should ever really matter. Which is actually what my soccer coach told the team a few days ago. But I'll talk about him later. I have a feeling this is going to be a massive blog. Anyway, music was the source of my pride and happiness for about 2 years.
I had been reminiscing on my long lost days of the outdoors group I was in for quite a while when I was little. The group leader, Mike, kind of made up for my dad's absence, which doesn't keep me from loving my dad as much as I possibly can, but introduced me into something consistent. The wild. Hmm. That's sounds a little contradictory. Oh well. Mike was always amazed by me. Apparently I gained some mad outdoors skillz faster than you can say "figure eight on a bite". Anyway, it had been bothering me for a while that I hadn't stuck with it and realized its importance when I was a lil one. Well, I guess that didn't really bother me. I mean, what was I supposed to do? I was like 10 and got the chance to take horseback riding lessons. He-LLO. But the point is, I missed Mike and being good at doing something most people never get the opportunity to do.
Sooo come sophomore year-
ooh real quick side story: I was the flute section leader in marching band my junior year (this year) so I made our section shirts. I misspelled "sophomores" on the back of the shirt. I typed "sophmores". Every time I look at those shirts I cry a little. 20 some shirts with the humanities student's mistake. >:(
Actually, I'm gonna stop here and publish this section so one of my friends can go ahead and start reading this novel.