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I’m a sucky blogger/ Updates on my life

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Sorry. 

Thought I might just let y’all know what’s been going on in my life recently, so this post will cover a range of topics that I will list in order to organize my thoughts.

1. My friends

Obviously, friendships have changed, and I’m okay with that. Regina is still one of my closest friends even though we don’t have any classes together this year, (tear), and I have two other really close friends, who I will refer to as Isa and April. I haven’t been friends with them for very long, but they’re the absolute best.

I have this other friend, Rosie, who I may or may not have talked about on here before. I think I have. I referred to her as my best friend last year, but ever since she got a boyfriend, I noticed the ever so slight disconnect, and the tear only turned into a rip with time. We’re working on patching it up this year, though, and I really like that. It was her birthday two days ago, and I hung around Rosie’s house with her and her boyfriend, and it was surprisingly pleasant.

I’ve also made a few more friends and/or gotten closer to certain people because we have classes together and things like that, but more about that some other time. 🙂

2. My family

My little brother Xav is starting sixth grade this coming week, and he’s really nervous. I can sort of see why: it’s the first time he’ll have to move classes, he doesn’t know the school as well as he knew his elementary school, and plus, eighth graders are scary. But he knows a lot of the kids that are going there, and he’s worried about being bullied, which doesn’t really make sense. Okay, his middle school doesn’t really have the best reputation, but it’s not that bad.

Also, if you’ve watched some of my Youtube videos, you’d notice that my filming location changed, and that’s because I was staying at my dad’s for a few weeks. I’m back at my mom’s now, and it feels weird, kind of like I’m coming back from a vacation, even though I was only 10 minutes away from my mom’s house. Anyway, it was fun.

3. My Youtube channel/ This blog

There’s been a lack of videos in the last two weeks because I’ve had absolutely no time to film or edit since school’s started. I always need to be doing something, whether it’s homework/studying, soccer practice, newspaper editing, and, as of two days ago, the school musical. We’re putting on Into the Woods, and I got Lucinda, one of the evil stepsisters, which I’m excited about. Unfortunately, it’s going to take time away from Youtube and blogging, which sucks, because I love talking to you guys. I’ll still try to do this stuff when I can, though.

4. My music taste

I don’t know why this is a category, haha. I just felt the need to discuss some of my recent favorite songs. I got into Imagine Dragons over the summer, but I kind of realized that a lot of their songs sounded the same, (don’t get me wrong, they’re still great), so I kind of moved away from them but sort of stuck to that genre of music and more. I listen to some Arctic Monkeys and One Republic and a lot of Lorde now. I started getting into the 5SOS craze too and re-fell in love with some One Direction songs. I also have Happy Little Pill on repeat by the  lovely lovely Troye Sivan, not to mention all songs by the amazing Shawn Mendes, (who I also happen to have a major crush on; Regina can vouch for this….How could you not? He’s adorable.) My friends are also trying to introduce me to The Vamps and the 1975. If you guys have good music/bands/songs, please do give it to me! I love listening to different things.

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So, I originally wrote two more categories, school and my birthday, but WordPress was mean and decided to delete them when I tried to post this. 😦

I’ll leave it at this for now. Will return when I have more time on my hands. Stay lovely! ❤

~Annika

Superstitions and ADHD and OCD and Mr. Williams

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So, as some of you may know, I’ve been taking a creative writing class for the past four weeks or so, and I’ve written a post about my teacher, Mr. Williams, about how he wowed the class with something.

Today, I’ll talk about how he offended me. Sort of.

Our class is reading The Things They Carried, which is about the Vietnam War, and he was telling us that soldiers have a lot of superstitions. So then, he asked the class if we had any superstitions, and he called on me first because I hadn’t really talked in the class before.

“I like to carry things around in evens,” I told him, which was sort of a stretch but not really, because I don’t care if I have an even number of coins or whatever, I just feel better about something, let’s say a ticket stub for waiting in line, if it’s an even number rather than an odd.

“Okay, anything else?”

“Um…Oh. Every night before I sleep, I look out my window four times.”

Mr. Williams paused for a moment, before looking at me and saying, “Well, that sounds a little OCD….” and then I don’t remember what he said afterward because I was kind of just like, Wait, what?

I was angry. We had a speech unit in our English class this past year, and one of my friends did her speech on quick or immediate diagnosis, especially with ADHD. She talked about how if a kid was really active or just wouldn’t sit down in class, their teacher would talk to their parents about getting them tested. Why are they so ready to jump to conclusions? Can you assume something just because of one trait they have?

Okay, whatever, my thing with evens may sound OCD to him, but I’m not OCD. And he doesn’t have the right to tell me I might be. Does he have any other evidence to prove that I’m obsessive compulsive? No, just my superstition.

What if I’ve had a problem with OCD? What if I am OCD and I don’t want anyone to know? What if being called OCD is a trigger for me? He doesn’t know any of that about me, and I found it a bit rude that he would venture to diagnose me in a creative writing class.

Those are just my thoughts.

~Annika

Un-American Qualms on the Fourth

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Today’s the Fourth of July here in the USA, so if you’re American and you’re reading this, Happy Independence Day!

The Fourth of July usually consists of the smell of hotdogs on the grill, bathing suits, awkward family encounters, the only time you can use your blue eyeliner, fireworks, and other festivities to celebrate Our Beautiful Country.

At least, that’s how it looks on tv.

For my family, the Fourth of July is quiet. We still dress up in our red, white, and blue, but don’t go to a big party. We grill, but only enough chicken and corn for three people. We haven’t gone to the fireworks in our neighborhood for the last few years because it’s always been packed, but somehow hearing the pop and crackle as they burst into the sky a few miles away is enough.

To be honest, I don’t even feel American. I learn about them at school, learned about the successes and difficulties and the days that made today, but I don’t identify with the Americans. The very fact that I call them “the Americans” instead of “us” should be an obvious indication.

I’m not from here. I’m an immigrant. I was born in a third world country fifteen years ago, and I love it there. That’s my home. I hardly have any family here, all my grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles are from back there. I only came here nine years ago, and while I’ve spent more time here than I’ve spent in my home country, it still hasn’t been enough to call the USA my home.

Not that I don’t love living in America. It’s absolutely amazing here. I have more freedom than I would have anywhere back home, great education for a much lower price, and I’m exposed to so much more different cultures and foods and ideas. I just still feel like I’m not an American, even if I’ve been living here for nearly a decade.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’m american by legal nationality, but I’m still living somewhere else in my heart.

Sorry for the cheesiness.

That’s just what I’ve been thinking about lately. Hope this didn’t put a damper on your Independence Day.

Happy 4th! 🙂

~Annika

I just wanted to give a big thank you to everyone who looked at and read my previous post. You all were so lovely with your comments and likes and feedback, and I am grateful for and appreciative to anyone who ever takes a look at my blog. Love you all! xx

A Look Inside My Brain: Philosophical Questions On A Train

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So, as some of you may know from watching my vlogs, (click here if you want to see the vlog where I talked about where the rest of this post is going), I’ve been taking two college-level classes this summer: social psychology and advanced creative writing. I have taken creative writing classes in the past, so I thought this would just be another one of them: come into class, write about a prompt, share said prompt, break, write some more, get homework, and leave.

Wow, was I wrong.

My teacher, whose name I will keep from the internet world for now, (but let’s just call him Mr. Williams), is really into meditation and enlightenment and zen and “Om” and on our second day of class, we had a discussion and talked and stuff and he basically shocked me with everything he had to say. So, naturally, on the hour-long train ride back home, I took out my blue composition book, my blue pen, and started writing. In cursive. Which I haven’t done since the fifth grade. I wrote the whole way home, and I filled up two pages, front and back.

You could say I was pretty enlightened.

Or, was I?

Here’s what I had to say:

“…today we learned about memories and Siddhartha and enlightenment. It wasn’t very interesting at first, since Mr. Williams started off reviewing what we had read in the book and then started asking us odd questions such as, ‘What would you change about society today?’ or,  ‘Are memories important?’ He called on me for the first question, to which I responded with something stupid like, ‘…I think society has this perception of what people should be, and people tell you to ‘be yourself’, but they really mean being yourself, but society’s view of your ‘best self’, if you kinda understand what I mean?’

Yeah. Real eloquent.

…We watched this documentary called ‘Unknown White Male’. It’s about this guy named Doug Bruce, who, one day, suddenly forgot who he was. He woke up one day on a New York subway train and got off at Coney Island not knowing his name or who he knew in life or what he was doing there. …Doug had no episodic memory, which is memory that deals with a person’s interactions with the world and other people and themselves. (He still knew behaviors and processes from his past life, however, like riding a bicycle.)

When we were 41 minutes in, Mr. Williams stopped the movie and asked, ‘Would you want to Doug-Bruce-it? Would you want to see the world with the eyes of a newborn baby but process it with an adult mind?’

Personally, I wouldn’t want to…I need to be able to know who I love, because what if I don’t love the people the people that are worth loving when I’ve got amnesia? How am I supposed to remember the feelings and history I had with people? Am I supposed to relearn all that? …What’s the purpose of memories? If people think that memories are useless, why have we been gifted with the power to remember them? Memories are there to remind us who we are…and if we lose those memories, we essentially lose ourselves, our being, our meaning.

And then after we’d discussed my teacher took a moment before pointing at the chalkboard that said ‘Doug-Bruce-it?’ and he said, ‘That’s enlightenment.’

That just awed the entire class. I was sure right down dumbfounded….I spent the whole walk down to the train thinking about it, and I’ve been amazed by it so much that now I’m writing about it. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that he’s correct. Enlightenment does mean you need to get rid of your past self…In order to be truly happy, you need to be able to let go of people and stay disconnected…

Enlightenment would be pretty cool, I guess, if it means opening your eyes to a brand new world and awakening anew. A clean slate, a blank canvas, new memories to be made. That would be nice…not a care in the world other than seeing the beauty and wisdom in everything around you. I can see it now: the fresh air with every breath I take, the freeing feeling of not belonging to anyone, no obligations or responsibilities, just me and the echoing earth.

But, then again, if being enlightened comes with the hefty price of losing all that and who you love, then how much would you be willing to pay for enlightenment?”

Hope you enjoyed this post; it’s quite different from what I usually write about but I felt like being a bit reflective and philosophical. 🙂

Love you all! ❤

~Annika

 

Me.

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Hi, I’m Annika.

Your average adolescent blogger that writes angsty, ranty, rambly blog posts in order to scare the internet into thinking she is angrier and sadder than she actually is.

(Sometimes.)

Only, I want to be someone more than your stereotype. I don’t want to be pushed into the category labeled “Teenage ‘Writers’ ” right away. I want to be the person that makes you think, makes you reflect, makes you feel something.

Basically, I want to be different.

Here’s some about me:

I use the word “lovely” too frequently, and since I have been watching too many british youtubers, I have recently inserted the word “rubbish” into my vocabulary, though it sounds quite odd coming out of the mouth of a person that isn’t from England.

I don’t really know if I have friends. Like, I know I do, but sometimes it seems like they aren’t always there for me, even if they are.

I write a bit. Although I am not that good.

I judge people way too easily, and that’s a habit I’ve been meaning to break.

My biggest flaw is probably that I care too much about what others think about me. I always always want everyone to like me, and even though I know that isn’t possible, I try to do everything in my power to have people accept me.

And lastly, online, I’m a lot more blunt/honest/sarcastic/sassy than I am in real life, so if you spotted me on the street, you’d probably be very surprised at the person I am.

Until the next post,

~Annika