A few of my favorite things

“I want to let you in on a secret. I’m not who you think I am. In fact, my disguise is so thin I’m surprised you haven’t seen right through me. I’m the girl of your dreams masquerading as your best friend. Sometimes I want to rip off the façade. But I can’t because you’ll get scared and you’ll run away again. So I decided that it’s better to live with the lie than expose my true feelings. My dad said there are two types of girls — the ones you grow out of and the ones you grow into. I really hope I’m the latter. I may not be the one you love today, but I’ll let you go for now, hoping one day you’ll fly back to me. Because I think you’re worth the wait.”

I think that this is enough for today.

"You make me want to drive on the highway at night across the country and laugh until it hurts and climb a hill and watch the sun rise and roll down the hill and scrape my knees and hug you until I can't anymore and think about how pleasant it feels to be young and broke and messed up and utterly alone and completely apart of something really big and important and never being able to explain that."

If you know anything about me, and if you're reading this you are probably one of my beautiful roommates meaning you do, you know that I never slow down. I stack things one on top of another never slowing down. I sacrifice things like sleep, relationships and calm so that I can do everything else. I've been thinking lately, however, about how much I used to love the details. My favorite pass time was swinging in a secret park watching the way the rain fell into the creek or reading the notes carved into the benches and wondering the stories of the people who left them. I used to love spending hours on end with a single album as though it were an old friend that I could learn something new about with every time I listened. And more than anything I loved knowing every single thing there was to know about a few close friends but I feel like I've traded that in for a vague knowledge of a lot of people. I want to run off to somewhere warm on the west coast where I can revel in anonymity and learn to capture emotions in pictures and get a low paying job in a record shop that I love and meet people who don't have the same viewpoint as I do but are willing to listen and grow and run along the beach and lay in the grass watching the sunrise and set and sew my own clothes and donate all the money I don't need and learn a whole bunch of quirky talents that I'll never really use and go to small concerts of bands consisting of nobody's who are somebody's somebody whenever I want and fall in love. With God, who he made me, and someone who inspires me constantly. I want a lot. Not too much though. No, I don't think it's to much. Until it happens though I suppose I'll need to take the time to live because that isn't too much either.

"No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice. None of this matters. We're just warming up.”- Chuck Palahnuik

I've been overwhelmed lately by the beautiful panic that comes with realizing that you only have 70 years if you're lucky. The wonderful push to try anything and everything because if you don't you might not get to. So, inspired in part by Hallie and Jodi's addiction to "The Buried Life" and in part because of an agreement I made with Sarah Wylie to experience all the excitement of life together, I have made this list. Some are lame and it will very likely get edited as I grow but for now, here it is:

1. Read the Bible all the way through.

2. Meet Sufjan Stevens.

3. Swim with a dolphin.

4. Skydive.

5. Tell someone the story of my life, sparing no details.

6. Learn to speak a foreign language.

7. Throw a huge party and invite every one of my friends.

8. Watch the launch of the space shuttle.

9. Spend a whole day eating junk food without feeling guilty.

10. Be an extra in a film.

11. Learn to speak my mind

12. Drive across North America

13. Make a large donation to a charity anonymously

14. Learn to rollerblade.

15. Learn how to play guitar

16. Help someone build a house

17. Get a tattoo with meaning

18. Buy a round-the-world air ticket and a backpack, and run away.

19. Fly in a fighter jet

20. Give my mother a dozen red roses and tell her I love her.

21. Be a member of the audience in a TV show.

22. Get a college degree

23. Send a message in a bottle.

24. Ride a camel into the desert.

25. Write a book.

26. Plant a tree.

27. Give a stranger 100$.

28. Write a fan letter to everyone I've ever loved.

29. Be homeless for a week.

30. Learn to ballroom dance properly.

31. Climb 14 of the 14er’s

32. Go paragliding

33. Fall deeply in love -- helplessly and unconditionally.

34. Go on a cruise.

35. Ride in a helicopter.

36. Be in a protest

37. Go to Walden Pond and read Thoreau while drifting in a canoe.

38. Stay out all night dancing and go to work the next day without having gone home (just once).

39. Drink beer at Oktoberfest in Munich.

40. Be someone's mentor.

41. Shower in a waterfall.

42. Ask for a raise.

43. Become a triathlete

44. Set foot on each of the seven continents.

45. Visit a real blues bar in Chicago.

46. Listen to Shane Claiborne talk.

47. Go up in a hot air balloon

48. See a lunar eclipse.

49. Eat a meal with Aaron Weiss.

50. Spend 24 hours praying

51. Experience weightlessness.

52. Sing a great song in front of an audience.

53. Ask someone I've only just met to go on a date.

54. Scuba in the Great Barrier Reef.

55. Give 10% of every paycheck.

56. Give birth to a child

57. Write your will.

58. Sleep under the stars.

59. Take a ride on the highest roller coaster in the country.

60. Volunteer for a month.

61. Cross a glacier on foot.

62. Learn how to bartend.

63. Watch an Opera.

64. Learn to juggle with three balls.

65. Drive the Autobahn.

66. Find a job I love.

67. Times square on New Year’s Eve

68. Climb an active volcano.

69. Raft through the Grand Canyon.

70. Donate money and put my name on something.

71. Buy my own house.

72. Grow a garden and eat the crops.

73. Buy a good camera and take the time to become great at photography.

74. Drive a convertible with the top down and music blaring.

75. Travel around the world

76. Run a 5k

77. Run a 10k.

78. Run a half marathon.

79. Attend one really huge rock concert.

80. Kiss someone you've just met.

81. Go to ACL.

82. Attend the Olympics.

83. Win money in Vegas.

84. Watch a major soccer game. Live.

85. Own 100 vinyl records

86. Adopt a child.

87. Ride a gondola in Venice.

88. See the Mona Lisa.

89. Go to Cornerstone Music Festival.

90. Visit the Holy Land.

91. Go to Bonnaroo.

92. Go canoeing or kayaking.

93. Ride a mechanical bull.

94. Go bungee jumping.

95. Go rock climbing.

96. Go zorbing.

97. Learn to bartend.

98. See the 7 Wonders of the World

99. Go to Disney World.

100. Climb the Statue of Liberty

"If I'm a crown without a king, if I'm a broken, open seed
If I come without a thing, I come with all I need
No boat out in the blue, no place to rest your head
The trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead

I do not exist, only You exist."- mewithoutYou

Well for those of you that were wondering (Jodi Sorenson to be specific) the title for my blog is a quote from a song. One of my favorites. For those of you that are wondering how I got roped into blogging anyways that is all due to two people I love VERY much, Jodi Sorenson and Hallie Miller, one of whom is waiting at this very minute for me to post. Problem is I have a deep love for the way words sound and feel and not putting thought into them feels like adultery to me. Who knows maybe this will be a exquisite love affair with my thoughts. Or maybe just a good excuse to sit with my roommates and laugh until I cry (quite literally).

Either way it's going to be an adventure