thatnight.net

The year of my 21st birthday, my days started moving a lot faster. Rather than each day having the potential to be something wonderful within itself, they all started clumping together as a means to achieve something in the future.

Until my 21st birthday, I could go through a hundred emotions in one week. I could wake up feeling enthusiastic, progress to annoyed, and go through depressed, stupid, and jubilant in one afternoon. Then, suddenly, I had weeks of “good” and “fine” and “normal.”

Was that adolescence ending?

It’s like life is becoming all of the things English teachers say to avoid when trying to become an interesting and descriptive writer.

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I was driving in my car yesterday when a radio DJ announced that Blink-182 would be performing in Pittsburgh this summer, and I sort of immediately squealed aloud. But then, when I got to thinking, I realized I wasn’t that excited. I don’t really like Blink-182 anymore, let alone follow them enough to know they were even touring again. And then it registered — I’ve reached the age wherein I’m subconsciously thrilled about bands I’m currently uninterested in because they provided significant background music to a much earlier period of my life.

And the fact that I marked that occasion as a significant occurrence without giving much thought to the actuality of Saturday being my last ever day of college shows how meaningful a role higher education has played in my life.

I’ve been saying for a year now that I wish I would’ve studied computer science or web design. While I don’t regret my major, which ended up being English lit (though I was only a handful of credits away from creative writing), it may have been a good idea to study something more career-oriented, as I’ve been hired to code three websites in the last two months, and not one person has offered to pay me for a pretty poem.

I do have a pretty good outlook on things, though. Twitter has my back, y’all.

(Thanks to everyone, even the jerks who landed their major-related dream jobs, for your responses, and Burgh Baby for the original tweet.)

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The day of my ninth grade semi-formal, my little sister Molly, who was seven at the time, stood in the driveway in her Easter dress as me and my friends busied ourselves with rolling our eyes and seeing how many poses we could accomplish with our dates without touching them.

Molly is unlike my fifteen-year-old self in several ways, most outwardly in her distaste for makeup and boys. Also, she’s on her way to eventually growing to be at least a foot taller than I am.

For years after that dance, and even after I started this website, she pretty much constantly looked a lot like this.

Every weekday, I pick her up for lacrosse practice, and her t-shirts are two sizes too big, her sweatpants are falling halfway down her hips, and her curly hair is wrapped in a frizzy ponytail on top of her head.

This past Friday was her ninth grade semi and I helped her get ready, thinking to myself the entire time, can someone get this girl a modeling contract?

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As of this week, I am 23 years old, which, as my roommate aptly put, is the year people begin to wonder what you’re doing with yourself. And on top of finishing college in ten days, after studying English for five years, I did what any reasonable person would do and put time and effort into redesigning my personal blog.

I decided to overhaul for a couple reasons, all of which centered around being generally bummed about blogging.

The first — There was way too much going on. I have a few screenshots of layouts I did when I was fifteen (eight years ago…HECK), and while the main reason for the minimal design was that I didn’t know much HTML aside from changing link color, all of that white space was sort of nice. It seems I’ve been attempting to appear more and more standard and professional with how I presented this place. Therefore, I wanted to draw and color most of the design by hand.

The second — Going back and reading past entries, I’ve been upset with how little they’ve reflected my actual life. I went to see The Phantom of the Opera for the first time last year, a play I obsessed over after seeing the movie during my freshman year of college, and I didn’t say much about it because I thought people would respond better to a discussion of the benefits of unsubscribing from cable. Granted, a post of OMG Phantom is SO AWESOME would’ve gotten less of a response than the 40-or-so comments I received hailing the benefits of not paying for TV, but what good did it do me?

I use the term “metal” to describe the things about the internet that are cold and icky and protruding with tangled wires, things like worrying more about readership numbers than actually writing about things that are important to me.

Suffice it to say, I added another section to this site as a place for what I affectionately refer to as dumb junk. It functions separately from the main blog so as not to clog RSS readers with gross amounts of little things I’d like to remember. I explained the changes a bit here.

Come on over! Refresh your browser fifty times!

Sleepy dog in pajamas!

Thanks for being here.

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